Under conditions known to tax their information processing capacities humans show selective attention effects that are a function of natural disposition, previous learning and/or instructions. Although much research on attention-like effects has been done with other animals, little of it has taken advantage of what we know about information processing in humans. The results with animals are hard to interpret. This proposal suggests a set of experiments investigating selective attention in pigeons (a) using situations which should stress the information processing capacities of these birds and (b) which take advantage of our knowledge from research on humans. This research is of importance in establishing general principles of information processing that may in time be extended to a variety of species.